Still Falls the Rain
by Teo Vaea
Summary: What happens between 3x16 and 4x1. Destiel. Warnings for slash, hardcore, BDSM, violence and heresy either right away or eventually. Go big or go home, right? ETA - I'm feeling like this might not be finding an audience here, maybe because the language is difficult to follow. I'll probably keep hacking along anyway. :)
1. Chapter 1

_Still falls the Rain_  
 _At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross._  
 _Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us—_  
 _On Dives and on Lazarus:_  
 _Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one._

 **Edith Sitwell**

I have lost a soul.

You say how easy a thing that must be, for souls are lost every day and there, across the Chasm, all souls are lost. They are infinite in number. Cast off, burning. You say that if they are lost, it is just. The definition of justice, of division, as sure and absolute as a line of black void that separates those whom we have thrown down, from those whom we clasp close to our bosom. It is not, you say so much that we cast them, as that they turned away.

I say this: fuck you.

Fuck you because every single one of them was crafted in His image and every single one of them is deserving - even more so capable - of redemption.

So, this stubborn vigil. On the edge of the world that is, looking into the world that is not, turning the curve of my ear away from the music of the spheres, the chorus of the host, to those lost, those gone, those who have been cast or turned away.

In time I will find him.  
In time I will once more take justice into my own hands and make it a shape that perhaps no one above or below wants, or intended.

Let them come to me and voice a complaint of it.  
Let them.

x

Of all sounds, rumor carries best.

Not from before me but behind me, whispers of a new prince among the legion, a rising star among those fallen, one more cruel, more perverse than all the rest. Slave become master, prisoner become gaoler.

Some unwilling recognition stirs in me. I recognize this; what remains when the rest is stripped away; a stubborn fury. A fury greater than the fires of Gehenna itself. This is raw will, which will somehow find a way to go on, blindly. Not by faith, not by hope but because it simply knows no other way, and that will be the thing that saves him.

Rumor sharpens into surety.

I wait, as some fisherman on a lonely shore.

Patient, looking for some telltale ripple, some gold sheen of recognition. Something, anything.

Instead I know where he is by the keening, by the hopeless, sorrowing sounds of those who have come under his hand. Some part of me should recoil. This is everything I am not. This is everything I stand against. This is what I put aside, what I and mine cast down.

But instead I reach my hand.

I grasp a shape that is inherently my own, for we are all stars falling.

I raise him.  
I raise him.

x

Lazarus.

His form is stone, his face is fire and also frost. While he has not yet waked I can clasp him to me, and still feel the humanity of him in my arms.

x

In the quiet, I whisper his name but he is a shape of angry red ribbons, tattered and burning, and when he wakes, it is his first and only intent to end me. He is strong; he always was. But while he was there, he has become stronger. He has gone past the line we drew and become a thing made new again, in a different image. He has forsaken his true form, our true form. He has bathed in the blood of innocents and drunk suffering deep into him. It's not the first time this has happened. It's not the first time that falling, someone turned the fire of the lake to his own ends, and even as he burned, forged himself a sword.

He comes at me livid.  
 ** _FEAR NOT_** I say, but it's lost on the wind of him as he rushes at me, and I will not lift my hand

 _I will not lift my hand_

And that is how I am, for the first time, nailed to the concrete by my wings and feet and he is dragging my entrails from the wound in my side.

That is how he devours me.

x

So it now becomes my torment.

His hunger is endless.  
He is wrath, embodied.

My unwillingness to die, my unwillingness to yield enrages him.

My unwillingness to rise and fight him enrages him even more.

These are the skills he has learned, and how he traversed from destroyed to destroyer. If it was this alone that kept whole a body and soul through those fires, then so be it.

I lift no hand, I make no protest. Yet for that he cannot bind me, for few things can and the most powerful of his magics are lost to him. Days, weeks, months pass as he tears at me, fruitless handfuls of flesh and feathers pooling light all around.

"Die," he commands me, when my suffering yields him nothing.

 ** _I can't_** , I tell him and whisper his name again. Soft.

I am rent one limb from the others, torn and cut and finally even if he fails to see the futility in it, I can, and I seize him in arms that are still strong and enfold him in wings still wide and perfect, and trap him in this embrace as he burns and rages, and whisper again

 _ **Dean**_

As if in naming him I can save him.


	2. Chapter 2

The place we are in has no form, no shape. Neither he nor I have need of these things, but as I release him eventually from me, I realize it should have something.

So I give it trees as tall as giants, and soft-falling rain.

*

He tears free of my grasp.

He stares at me, water reflecting light all around him, furred branches heavy with it. The smell is oddly familiar to me, where here I should have no sense of smell and I see that somehow it is with him, also. Just for a moment, before I offer him my hand.

Before he puts a knife through it.

They say we host are creatures of justice. Of retribution. We are His will, His law on earth. An army. Soldiers, bearing weapons of divine wrath. That is what Daniel saw us to be. As Michael, sword-wielding. Terrible, inexorable, fearsome.

Is this what he sees now? We are still as we stand, facing each other, my hand pierced through and the slow luminous fall of what I bleed pooling on the soft ground below. He grips the knife, still staring. Face twisted in fear and hate. His gaze is black as coal, as the dark underbelly of the universe. I remember what it had been, the colors of oak and moss, late afternoon sunlight and what once lay in that gaze, burning intensity, passionate love and loyalty, for all his feigned laconic indifference.

"Your name is Dean Winchester," I tell him. "You are here because you willingly sacrificed yourself, in loving devotion, for your brother."

The knife sinks slow, and I close my fist, reflexive against it and then look down at that fist. And slowly force it open again.

"I am Castiel. Malak. Messenger. בני האלהים, one of the bene Elohim. Sons of the Father. "

He's listening. Even as his eyes blaze black hatred, some deep part of him

 _hearkens_

and I go on.

"This is not your true form."

"LIAR"

His gaze has come to my hand, and the knife, and he sinks it more yet again, in punishment, in test, for the sheer pleasure of it or all these things.

"You are made in His image. That is your true shape, you true nature."

"LIAR"

At last I reach my free hand. It curves his cheek and in all my aching hope for their kind, I have known no relief like this, where the ghost of warm skin, weather of a day's hard travel and stubble is there under my touch, under the visage of hatred he has become.

"You are loved," I tell him, and I mean those I have known, those who surround him, those he cares for and defends, even those people years and miles behind him whose gratitude and love for what he did for them he'll never know.

At the same time, there is some flutter of something, unbidden in my own breast. Even as I say those words of others, and realize I mean more.

A moment's arrest, where he forgets to call me a liar again and I forget the knife, and the rain falls.

Then he pulls the knife free and plunges it into my heart and tears claws through my feathers and flesh and we do it all over again.

*

Forty days, forty nights. Is that the number? He doesn't realize that there is nothing of me that once sundered, is not still whole. Even were he to burn me to ash, disperse me as motes of dust.

He fights, I bleed, bright feathers drift until finally I once again enfold him and

 ** _HUSH_**

I tell him and speak his name and

Now I am sure I feel the rugged lines of his frame in my arms, sweetly imperfect, utterly mortal. A human weight, which for a moment ceases the raging struggle and instead coils in terrified relief against me.

I wrap him tighter still, until there is nothing there but all I am, whatever wings and light and love and benediction I can offer him.

One moment.

Eye of the storm.

One moment, and it will become signal to me, one bright and glittering thing. For all my overlong eternity.


End file.
